Here are the third and fourth pages of “The Revenge of Dr. Elvis,” the story from our Free Comic Book Day sampler. More pages tomorrow, and you can download the full FCBD book on Friday!
If you’re a comics fan you’ve probably heard the news already, but the great autobiographical comics writer Harvey Pekar died yesterday. (Tom Spurgeon has a lovely pre-obituary here.) I’ve only read a fraction of Pekar’s vast body of work, but what I have read has stuck with me in ways that few comics have. In 2004, when the American Splendor movie came out, I was lucky enough to talk briefly with Pekar on the phone for a story in Athens, GA’s Flagpole magazine, and even in that short conversation the qualities that Spurgeon mentions–his honesty about writing, his appreciation of everyday virtues–shone through. I’m kind of a lousy interviewer, and I don’t think I captured his voice very well in the piece, but I at least tried to get across why his comics matter. The comics world is much poorer without him in it.
-Gardner